NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 Review: Retaking The Performance Crown
by Ryan Smith on March 22, 2012 9:00 AM ESTPortal 2
Portal 2 continues the long and proud tradition of Valve’s in-house Source engine. While Source continues to be a DX9 engine, Valve has continued to upgrade it over the years to improve its quality, and combined with their choice of style you’d have a hard time telling it’s over 7 years old at this point. Consequently Portal 2’s performance does get rather high on high-end cards, but we have ways of fixing that…
Portal 2 ends up being the strongest lead yet for the GTX 680, with the GTX 680 taking a 17% lead at 2560. What’s especially interesting though is performance in the bonus round with SSAA enabled – the GTX 680 takes a wholly unexpected and completely stunning 44% lead over the 7970. In fact it beats out everything here, including the GTX 590 and Radeon HD 6990. Meanwhile the lead over the GTX 580 is even more amazing, with the GTX 680 leading by 67% at these settings.
As it stands the GTX 680 is the first single-GPU card to do better than 60fps, and it does so in a landslide. All things considered, for a lack of memory bandwidth and ROP changes compared to Fermi GTX 680 does extremely well here.
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Hrel - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
It is a little weird that Nvidia gave up ground on the compute side, but their architecture is still vastly superior at tesselation. Which is the main point of DirectX11 and the biggest breakthrough in graphics in the past 12 years; maybe longer. AMD has improved that part of their GPU's quite a bit since the HD4000/HD5000 series; but they clearly still have a long way to go.Nvidia wins on every single front; this is why all my graphics cards are Nvidia now. I'm just glad AMD is so competitive, hopefully prices will start falling again, before December.
SydneyBlue120d - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Hope to see some testing about video decoding and encoding, especially 4K compared with AMD cards :) Thanks :)shaggart5446 - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
seems like tom is getting paid just like fuddo where on earth could you say gtx680 is better than 7970 nediot pick your games them what to bench mark why did amd win in some test result shouldnt nediot wins all the bench mark if your gonna say gtx680 is fastersilverblue - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
No.CeriseCogburn - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Obviously amd has been paying off Crysis and Metro game companies )CeriseCogburn - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
But not Crysis 2 game company which we can't benchmark anymore because amd can't play that modern title )edwpang - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
It'll be interesting to know the real engine clock these cards are running when testing, since GTX 680 has the "Boost Clock" feature.Ryan Smith - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Unfortunately Precision X doesn't have any logging, so I don't have any precise numbers. However I did take notes from what I saw in Precision X during our testing, which I'm happy to post here (just keep in mind that they're my internal notes).----
Crysis: Generally sustained at 1097; fluctuates some at 2560 between 1071 and 1097 due to power load.
Metro: Frequently bounces between a range of 1045 to 1097.
Dirt 3: Bounces between 1084 and 1097.
Shogun 2: Fluctuates between 1071 and 1019; very high load.
Batman: Some fluctuating between 1097 and 107.
CivV: Mostly 1097; a few drops to 1084.
Portal 2: Between 1058 and 1006.
BF3: 1097 sustained
SC2: 1097 sustained
Skyrim: 1097 sustained
SLG: 1097 sustained
Everyone - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
"the GTX 680 is faster, cooler, and quieter than the Radeon HD 7970"Sounds just like the launch of the 5870. But here's the problem. I bought a 5870 over two years ago, in a decent sale which had it priced at $325. Just now, two years later, are we getting cards that beat its performance by a wide margin and make me feel like it's actually time to upgrade. But look at the pricing! The Nvidia 680 is $500. There still isn't a card out there at the price level I paid two years ago (a price level I feel very comfortable with in contrast to the over $500 card market which I view as 'high end out of my wallet range') gives me a decent jump in performance over my 5870.
I read every new videocard review anandtech posts, but I can't shake the feeling that something here is a little weird. In such a rapidly evolving market, why is it that two years later there hasn't been a realistic improvement in the level of graphics cards that I (and many others I'd imagine) am interested in?
prophet001 - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
talk to obama